Under siege

I am among those Israelis who are ready, in principle, for almost any concession that would end our conflict with the Palestinians. In the late 1990s I undertook, as a religious Jew, a journey of prayer and meditation into Islam and Christianity in the Holy Land in an attempt to discover a common language of devotion with my neighbors. That journey took me into mosques and pilgrimage sites in the Galilee, the West Bank and Gaza. During one memorable visit to a mosque in a Gaza refugee camp, I joined the Muslim prayer line; on bended knee, I felt our common claim to God’s love, and the legitimacy of a faith that induces such devotion among its believers.

Author

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research institute. He is author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (Morrow).